Alexander Edmonds
Biographic Data
| ID | 146617 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexander Edmonds |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexander |
| FAMILY NAME | Edmonds |
| SIGNATURE | EDMONDS A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0009-0002-6730-6023 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 244 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Which barbell do you use now?' Exploring a transgender man’s embodiment through Olympic weightlifting
Army of the vulnerable
Since ending conscription in 1963, Britain has fought its 'small wars' with professional soldiers from deprived areas of the country, many recruited under the age of 18. During the 21st-century war on terror, these personnel were deemed vulnerable, at heightened risk of psychosocial harms, and entitled to more protection. Vulnerable soldiers bring a dangerous vulnerability into the state. While postimperial Britain relied on them to fill infantry…
Anthropology and complicated people
Revealing complexity in the world-but also creating it-is at the heart of anthropology. It shapes our engagement with theory and ethics, writing and visual style, and choice of research subjects. But does it create blind spots? I respond to this question by discussing studies of violence, and my ethnographic material in progress on British ex-soldiers. Owing to the ethical norm of suspending moral judgment of our research participants, we tend to…
Making faces racial
Engaging with debates about the re-emergence of the race concept in science, this article opens up facial plastic surgery's expertise of racial phenotypes to inquiry. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of medical discourse, it analyses how this expertise is made and put into practice in three nations with large cosmetic surgery markets: the US, Korea, and Brazil. Plastic surgery has drawn on the scientific knowledge of race from field…
Entre saúde e aprimoramento
Este estudo explora as margens da medicina, em que práticas de saúde e aprimoramento se confundem. Ele é baseado no trabalho de campo desenvolvido no contexto de dois projetos de pesquisa distintos no Brasil sobre cirurgia plástica e terapias de hormônio sexual. Há uma significativa sobreposição clínica dessas duas terapias. Ambas estão disponíveis nos sistemas de saúde público e privado de tal forma que revelam a dinâmica de classes subjacente à…
Moral Authority and Authoritarianism
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, many South American democracies fell under the control of authoritarian military regimes. The military governments attempted to prevent leftist revolution by eliminating or silencing “subversive” elements in society, leading to systematic violations of human rights and widespread political repression. Within this context, the Catholic Church was often the only institution with the opportunity to defend human rights…
Surgery-for-Life
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork on plastic surgery to explore tensions in aging norms and ideals for women in Brazil. I situate my analysis in relation to debates about a 'de-chronologized life course.' Some scholars argue that the life course in late capitalism has become less standardized. In this account, chronological age diminishes in importance as consumers are defined by life style choices available to all ages and the period …
Medical borderlands
This paper explores medical borderlands where health and enhancement practices are entangled. It draws on fieldwork carried out in the context of two distinct research projects in Brazil on plastic surgery and sex hormone therapies. These two therapies have significant clinical overlap. Both are made available in private and public healthcare in ways that reveal the class dynamics underlying Brazilian medicine. They also have an important experim…
The unintended consequences of sex education
This paper is an ethnography of a four-year, multi-disciplinary adolescent sexual and reproductive health intervention in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador. An important goal of the intervention--and of the larger global field of adolescent sexual and reproductive health--is to create more open parent-to-teen communication. This paper analyzes the project's efforts to foster such communication and how social actors variously interpreted, responded t…
Primary healthcare providers’ views on improving sexual and reproductive healthcare for adolescents in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua
OBJECTIVES: To elicit the views of primary healthcare providers from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua on how adolescent sexual and reproductive health (ASRH) care in their communities can be improved. METHODS: Overall, 126 healthcare providers (46 from Bolivia, 39 from Ecuador, and 41 from Nicaragua) took part in this qualitative study. During a series of moderated discussions, they provided written opinions about the accessibility and appropriate…
The biological subject of aesthetic medicine
This article explores how race, sexual attractiveness and 'female nature' are biologised in plastic surgery. I situate this analysis in relation to recent debates over the limits of social constructionism and calls for more engagement with biology in feminist theory and science studies. I analyse not only how the biological is represented by biomedicine, but also how it is experienced by patients and, most problematically, how it is entangled wit…
Can Medicine Be Aesthetic
This article analyzes tensions between aesthetics and health in medicine. The blurring of distinctions between reconstructive and cosmetic procedures, and the linking of plastic surgery with other medical treatments, have added to the legitimacy of an emerging "aesthetic medicine." As cosmetic surgeries become linked to other medical procedures with perceived greater medical necessity, health and aesthetics become entangled. One consequence is th…
A Right to Beauty
Almost Invisible Scars
Along with a handful of other nations in the developing world, Brazil has emerged as a top destination for medical tourism. Drawing on the author's ethnographic fieldwork in plastic surgery wards, this article examines diverse factors - some explicitly promoted in medical marketing and news sources, others less visible - contributing to Brazil's international reputation for excellence in cosmetic plastic surgery. Brazil's plastic surgery residenc…
Pretty Modern
Learning to Love Yourself
Brazilian plastic surgeons have successfully promoted a psychotherapeutic rationale for cosmetic surgery. This article critically engages with this 'philosophy' of health, analyzing how it is deployed in busy teaching hospitals. I show how a tradition of intimate hierarchy and class dynamics in medical institutions informs the experimental ethos of clinical practice as patients internalize a psychotherapeutic notion of health and management regim…
Triumphant Miscegenation
In Brazil racial mixture, mestiçagem has been a dominant theme in the political and cultural re-imagination of the nation in the twentieth century. This paper approaches the role of mixture in Brazilian social life from the angle of aesthetics, looking both at Brazilian intellectual history and the commercial and medical beauty industry. It first discusses the aesthetics of race in the works of Brazilian scholar Gilberto Freyre. Second, drawing o…
The poor have the right to be beautiful
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in hospitals that offer cosmetic surgery to the poor, this article examines the causes of a rapid growth in plastic surgery rates in Brazil over the past two decades. It argues that problems with diverse social origins manifest themselves as aesthetic defects, which are diagnosed and treated by the beauty industry. But plastic surgery also incites the consumer desires of people on the margins of the market econom…
Pretty Modern
The poor have the right to be beautiful
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in hospitals that offer cosmetic surgery to the poor, this article examines the causes of a rapid growth in plastic surgery rates in Brazil over the past two decades. It argues that problems with diverse social origins manifest themselves as aesthetic defects, which are diagnosed and treated by the beauty industry. But plastic surgery also incites the consumer desires of people on the margins of the market econom…
Learning to Love Yourself
Brazilian plastic surgeons have successfully promoted a psychotherapeutic rationale for cosmetic surgery. This article critically engages with this 'philosophy' of health, analyzing how it is deployed in busy teaching hospitals. I show how a tradition of intimate hierarchy and class dynamics in medical institutions informs the experimental ethos of clinical practice as patients internalize a psychotherapeutic notion of health and management regim…
Can Medicine Be Aesthetic
This article analyzes tensions between aesthetics and health in medicine. The blurring of distinctions between reconstructive and cosmetic procedures, and the linking of plastic surgery with other medical treatments, have added to the legitimacy of an emerging "aesthetic medicine." As cosmetic surgeries become linked to other medical procedures with perceived greater medical necessity, health and aesthetics become entangled. One consequence is th…
Entre saúde e aprimoramento
Este estudo explora as margens da medicina, em que práticas de saúde e aprimoramento se confundem. Ele é baseado no trabalho de campo desenvolvido no contexto de dois projetos de pesquisa distintos no Brasil sobre cirurgia plástica e terapias de hormônio sexual. Há uma significativa sobreposição clínica dessas duas terapias. Ambas estão disponíveis nos sistemas de saúde público e privado de tal forma que revelam a dinâmica de classes subjacente à…
Medical borderlands
This paper explores medical borderlands where health and enhancement practices are entangled. It draws on fieldwork carried out in the context of two distinct research projects in Brazil on plastic surgery and sex hormone therapies. These two therapies have significant clinical overlap. Both are made available in private and public healthcare in ways that reveal the class dynamics underlying Brazilian medicine. They also have an important experim…
Triumphant Miscegenation
In Brazil racial mixture, mestiçagem has been a dominant theme in the political and cultural re-imagination of the nation in the twentieth century. This paper approaches the role of mixture in Brazilian social life from the angle of aesthetics, looking both at Brazilian intellectual history and the commercial and medical beauty industry. It first discusses the aesthetics of race in the works of Brazilian scholar Gilberto Freyre. Second, drawing o…
The biological subject of aesthetic medicine
This article explores how race, sexual attractiveness and 'female nature' are biologised in plastic surgery. I situate this analysis in relation to recent debates over the limits of social constructionism and calls for more engagement with biology in feminist theory and science studies. I analyse not only how the biological is represented by biomedicine, but also how it is experienced by patients and, most problematically, how it is entangled wit…
Surgery-for-Life
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork on plastic surgery to explore tensions in aging norms and ideals for women in Brazil. I situate my analysis in relation to debates about a 'de-chronologized life course.' Some scholars argue that the life course in late capitalism has become less standardized. In this account, chronological age diminishes in importance as consumers are defined by life style choices available to all ages and the period …
The unintended consequences of sex education
This paper is an ethnography of a four-year, multi-disciplinary adolescent sexual and reproductive health intervention in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador. An important goal of the intervention--and of the larger global field of adolescent sexual and reproductive health--is to create more open parent-to-teen communication. This paper analyzes the project's efforts to foster such communication and how social actors variously interpreted, responded t…
Almost Invisible Scars
Along with a handful of other nations in the developing world, Brazil has emerged as a top destination for medical tourism. Drawing on the author's ethnographic fieldwork in plastic surgery wards, this article examines diverse factors - some explicitly promoted in medical marketing and news sources, others less visible - contributing to Brazil's international reputation for excellence in cosmetic plastic surgery. Brazil's plastic surgery residenc…
Moral Authority and Authoritarianism
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, many South American democracies fell under the control of authoritarian military regimes. The military governments attempted to prevent leftist revolution by eliminating or silencing “subversive” elements in society, leading to systematic violations of human rights and widespread political repression. Within this context, the Catholic Church was often the only institution with the opportunity to defend human rights…
Which barbell do you use now?' Exploring a transgender man’s embodiment through Olympic weightlifting
Anthropology and complicated people
Revealing complexity in the world-but also creating it-is at the heart of anthropology. It shapes our engagement with theory and ethics, writing and visual style, and choice of research subjects. But does it create blind spots? I respond to this question by discussing studies of violence, and my ethnographic material in progress on British ex-soldiers. Owing to the ethical norm of suspending moral judgment of our research participants, we tend to…
Making faces racial
Engaging with debates about the re-emergence of the race concept in science, this article opens up facial plastic surgery's expertise of racial phenotypes to inquiry. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of medical discourse, it analyses how this expertise is made and put into practice in three nations with large cosmetic surgery markets: the US, Korea, and Brazil. Plastic surgery has drawn on the scientific knowledge of race from field…
A Right to Beauty
Triumphant Miscegenation
In Brazil racial mixture, mestiçagem has been a dominant theme in the political and cultural re-imagination of the nation in the twentieth century. This paper approaches the role of mixture in Brazilian social life from the angle of aesthetics, looking both at Brazilian intellectual history and the commercial and medical beauty industry. It first discusses the aesthetics of race in the works of Brazilian scholar Gilberto Freyre. Second, drawing o…
The poor have the right to be beautiful
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in hospitals that offer cosmetic surgery to the poor, this article examines the causes of a rapid growth in plastic surgery rates in Brazil over the past two decades. It argues that problems with diverse social origins manifest themselves as aesthetic defects, which are diagnosed and treated by the beauty industry. But plastic surgery also incites the consumer desires of people on the margins of the market econom…
Learning to Love Yourself
Brazilian plastic surgeons have successfully promoted a psychotherapeutic rationale for cosmetic surgery. This article critically engages with this 'philosophy' of health, analyzing how it is deployed in busy teaching hospitals. I show how a tradition of intimate hierarchy and class dynamics in medical institutions informs the experimental ethos of clinical practice as patients internalize a psychotherapeutic notion of health and management regim…
Pretty Modern
Almost Invisible Scars
Along with a handful of other nations in the developing world, Brazil has emerged as a top destination for medical tourism. Drawing on the author's ethnographic fieldwork in plastic surgery wards, this article examines diverse factors - some explicitly promoted in medical marketing and news sources, others less visible - contributing to Brazil's international reputation for excellence in cosmetic plastic surgery. Brazil's plastic surgery residenc…
A Right to Beauty
Primary healthcare providers’ views on improving sexual and reproductive healthcare for adolescents in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua
OBJECTIVES: To elicit the views of primary healthcare providers from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua on how adolescent sexual and reproductive health (ASRH) care in their communities can be improved. METHODS: Overall, 126 healthcare providers (46 from Bolivia, 39 from Ecuador, and 41 from Nicaragua) took part in this qualitative study. During a series of moderated discussions, they provided written opinions about the accessibility and appropriate…
The biological subject of aesthetic medicine
This article explores how race, sexual attractiveness and 'female nature' are biologised in plastic surgery. I situate this analysis in relation to recent debates over the limits of social constructionism and calls for more engagement with biology in feminist theory and science studies. I analyse not only how the biological is represented by biomedicine, but also how it is experienced by patients and, most problematically, how it is entangled wit…
Can Medicine Be Aesthetic
This article analyzes tensions between aesthetics and health in medicine. The blurring of distinctions between reconstructive and cosmetic procedures, and the linking of plastic surgery with other medical treatments, have added to the legitimacy of an emerging "aesthetic medicine." As cosmetic surgeries become linked to other medical procedures with perceived greater medical necessity, health and aesthetics become entangled. One consequence is th…
Moral Authority and Authoritarianism
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, many South American democracies fell under the control of authoritarian military regimes. The military governments attempted to prevent leftist revolution by eliminating or silencing “subversive” elements in society, leading to systematic violations of human rights and widespread political repression. Within this context, the Catholic Church was often the only institution with the opportunity to defend human rights…
Surgery-for-Life
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork on plastic surgery to explore tensions in aging norms and ideals for women in Brazil. I situate my analysis in relation to debates about a 'de-chronologized life course.' Some scholars argue that the life course in late capitalism has become less standardized. In this account, chronological age diminishes in importance as consumers are defined by life style choices available to all ages and the period …
Medical borderlands
This paper explores medical borderlands where health and enhancement practices are entangled. It draws on fieldwork carried out in the context of two distinct research projects in Brazil on plastic surgery and sex hormone therapies. These two therapies have significant clinical overlap. Both are made available in private and public healthcare in ways that reveal the class dynamics underlying Brazilian medicine. They also have an important experim…
The unintended consequences of sex education
This paper is an ethnography of a four-year, multi-disciplinary adolescent sexual and reproductive health intervention in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador. An important goal of the intervention--and of the larger global field of adolescent sexual and reproductive health--is to create more open parent-to-teen communication. This paper analyzes the project's efforts to foster such communication and how social actors variously interpreted, responded t…
Entre saúde e aprimoramento
Este estudo explora as margens da medicina, em que práticas de saúde e aprimoramento se confundem. Ele é baseado no trabalho de campo desenvolvido no contexto de dois projetos de pesquisa distintos no Brasil sobre cirurgia plástica e terapias de hormônio sexual. Há uma significativa sobreposição clínica dessas duas terapias. Ambas estão disponíveis nos sistemas de saúde público e privado de tal forma que revelam a dinâmica de classes subjacente à…
Making faces racial
Engaging with debates about the re-emergence of the race concept in science, this article opens up facial plastic surgery's expertise of racial phenotypes to inquiry. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of medical discourse, it analyses how this expertise is made and put into practice in three nations with large cosmetic surgery markets: the US, Korea, and Brazil. Plastic surgery has drawn on the scientific knowledge of race from field…
Anthropology and complicated people
Revealing complexity in the world-but also creating it-is at the heart of anthropology. It shapes our engagement with theory and ethics, writing and visual style, and choice of research subjects. But does it create blind spots? I respond to this question by discussing studies of violence, and my ethnographic material in progress on British ex-soldiers. Owing to the ethical norm of suspending moral judgment of our research participants, we tend to…
Which barbell do you use now?' Exploring a transgender man’s embodiment through Olympic weightlifting
Army of the vulnerable
Since ending conscription in 1963, Britain has fought its 'small wars' with professional soldiers from deprived areas of the country, many recruited under the age of 18. During the 21st-century war on terror, these personnel were deemed vulnerable, at heightened risk of psychosocial harms, and entitled to more protection. Vulnerable soldiers bring a dangerous vulnerability into the state. While postimperial Britain relied on them to fill infantry…
Political science (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Ethnography (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Art (8 works) · Body Image and Dysmorphia Studies (8 works) · Anthropology (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Medicine (6 works)